Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

by bmaples Mon Sep 5th, 2005 at 08:01:50 PDTI keep seeing discussion about the "strategy" Dems and progressives should be adopting in re the Katrina/FEMA/BushCo disaster. The problem is, you won't get the right answer because you're not asking the right question.

The question is, What are the strategies we should be using?

bmaples's diary :: :: On the one hand, some people are griping because Dr. Dean and leading Dems in government are not holding press conferences, demanding impeachment, or pushing for investigations. Others claim that doing those things would actually take the heat off the BushCo crowd by "politicizing" the tragedy. Finally, still others respond that it's not right to let this administration off the hook, yet again. And through it all, we continue to be concerned and agitated about the people who need help actually getting it.

The answer is found in all of these comments, and it is simple: a multi-pronged, multi-level strategy. What you do depends on who you are and where you are.

1. Everyone, everywhere. Find a way to help: donate money, donate supplies, open your home. whatever you can do. I read more than one poll yesterday where 40% or more had yet to do anything. If we care as much as we say we care, the donation rate among Dems and progressives must be 100%.This is actually a very worthy statement. I really don't care WHO gets credit for donations as long as they are made. I have. Have YOU?

2. Everyday folks, inside the disaster: Share your stories, good and bad. All that is needed is the truth. If, as Haley Barbour said, the situation on the ground in Mississippi is much better than NO, we should hear that. If you were at a checkpoint and they turned away relief supplies, we should know that, too. There is nothing more powerful than first-person. (I started to put something like "Take care of yourself" at the top of this section, but everything I wrote sounded trite. In no way do I mean to imply that people affected by this tragedy should first think of politics; their first task, and our first wish, is for them to be safe and cared for. But, the country still needs to hear from them, especially if there is beginning to be a media blackout.)

3. Everyday folks, outside the disaster: Continue to raise hell. Write LTEs, contact your reps. Be direct, be concise, be respectful, but also be up front about your anger and disgust. Be sure to ask your reps, when are THEY going to speak out? As one state senator told me, "I've often wanted to speak out, but based on the lack of communications from my , I figured no one had my back." Let them know we have their back.

4. Mid-level politicians: Keep the buzz growing. Begin to call for action, change, investigations. When interviewed, raise the tough questions. Start some buzz in the halls of power, even with your Repub counterparts. Focus on "competence" and "lack of national security." And, be sure to ask the local leaders in the areas you represent, how well are WE prepared, and how do we feel about counting on FEMA after this?

Well since FEMA followed the Emergency Blueprint while New Orleans and did not? What's the beef? Notice above they admit"Haley Barbour said, the situation on the ground in Mississippi is much better than NO"

Well DUH! Mississippi DID live up to their . Recall that it was THERE that the MAIN FORCE of hit. Same FEMA worse impact, Local Authorities.

5. Top-level politicians: Wait for the moment, then strike. Focus for now on the relief effort, and be quiet for now on the political ramifications. Give the nation's anger a little more time to build. Hold back, hold on, hold it, hold it -- then in one large, joint press conference (I can see Reid, Pelosi, Nagin, Blanco, and about twenty more), call for the resignation of Chertoff and Brown, and the censure of the President by Congress. List the reasons (should be a fairly hard-hitting list) and have a handout with sourcing and documentation.Loose translation, pretend to care then lie to the American People, rabble rouse with baseless agit-prop. I would expect a new Moore Fiction.If this builds like I think it might, and if we follow the steps above, it could be a political Perfect Storm. It's all in the marketingI think (without any first-hand knowledge)

Oh I am rolling in the floor laughing, yes the most important requirement for DailyKos polemics,

NO first-hand knowledge!

that something like this is what has kept the Reids of the world quiet for now. They can't make a big play until they feel that the national political will is ready to be moved in that direction. That preparation work is up to us, and to the mid-level pols.

That's what you call real leaders, if the marketing poll say no, fold.So, keep up the groundswell, and let's hope that when the mayors and governors and back-seat/middle-seat congressfolk give their statements to the media, that along with the "here's what we're doing" and "here's what you can do" parts, they also have a "Why?" part, definitely an "I'm concerned for what this lack of federal competence means for our community/state/region" part, and maybe even an "I'm angry and I want action" moment as well.

Loose translation. This President we keep calling Fascist, did NOT overstep his Constitutional Authority!We want a Democratic President who will DO THAT!

Picture a pyramid. The people at the point can't take action until the base is wide enough and the middle has followed. Keep making the base bigger, and start trying to get the middle to follow -- that's our tasks for the next few weeks.

Times have changed. West Germany faced threat and destruction, by human power. We have faced destruction by the power of Nature.

There are many Germans who feel the same as most might have all those years ago, but some Germans feel differently. To them we are no longer Berliners.

President Bush has been accused of losing us Allies.I read the following and I think, such Allies we are better off without. Let them go their way, and we will go ours. We do not have to be enemies, but we are no longer friends.

But then I remember that this website in Germany IS our friend, The people they quote are not by a long shot. But they still do not speak for the whole.

So read the following, I would expect your reaction will be fury, but keep in mind not they do not speak for ALL Germans.

We knew this would happen. We knew some sick member of Germany's extreme left-wing media would express their deep joy at the tragedy in New Orleans. Of course, we hoped that such twisted outbursts of Schadenfreude would simply never happen. But this is Germany. This is the same country where 31% of Germans under 30 believed the US government could have been behind September 11. So, in a way, we weren't shocked to see the following piece by Philipp Mausshardt in the Tageszeitung (taz). But the article, entitled "The True Catastrophe" is shocking nonetheless. The concluding paragraphs read: "Yet joy and sympathy beat simultaneously in my chest. I am, for example, joyful at the moment that the latest hurricane catastrophe hasn't again hit some poor land, but instead the richest country in the world.

Yes, I even see in that a form of balancing justice for that which the inhabitants of that country have done to others through their war in Iraq.

I would, however, be even more happy, if I knew that only the houses of Bush voters and members of the Army had been destroyed.

I feel genuinely sorry for all the rest."

What an enlightened thing to think: It's just fine if people suffer, suffocate and starve, as long as they are political opponents or have a different worldview. It's just fine if people lose their homes and drown in their own feces, as long as they are members of the US military and red-state Bush voters. It isn't so bad that an entire city has been flooded and thousands killed and displaced because it is somehow "balancing justice" for this to be happening to the United States and not some poor nation.

One last thought. This author has people who agree with him, HERE in this country.

You know who they are, the ghouls who are trying so hard to put this tragedy to use to gain more political power.

So don't spend too much energy railing about the spiteful words in publications from other lands.

Bush Kills Rehnquist,US chief justice diesWashington - William Rehnquist, chief justice and a leading conservative voice on the US Supreme Court, died on Saturday after losing a battle with thyroid cancer, setting up a new political battle for President George W Bush over the makeup of the judiciary.

I am taking odds on where this Outcry will come from and how long it will take.

Do You Know Your Neighbors?
I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the last week or so.

When fractured, bone heals back stronger, when you exercise, muscle tissue breaks down and the body builds IT back stronger.

Those who spend their lives only avoiding mistakes, never learn.

Those who blame their mistakes on others or try to justify their actions, never grow.

Life is choices, decisions and actions, some wise, some foolish, but it is always about change and growth.

That which changes, grows. That which never changes withers and dies.

One odd thing about the bulk of the coverage of the effects of Katrina, is that it has mostly been about Louisiana and New Orleans. I say that because it was Mississippi which got hit with the brunt, the full force of the storm.

But we don't hear as much about Mississippi, Maybe because the actions taken, were by those who did not wait for the Government to do something.

That is the difference between those who say and think , "They need to do something" and then wait for it to happen, and those who say and think, "WE need to do something." then do what they can.

That first group has forgotten something very important. There is a hint in the first three words of the Constitution of the United States.

"We the People"

We ARE the Government. So when we say, "The Government should DO something." What we are really saying is "WE should do something."

Mississippi remembered. Some people in Louisiana, forgot. That may be the difference.

There are things the Federal Government needs to do.There are things the State Government needs to do.There are things the Country and City Governments need to do.

There are SOME things WE need to do.

Are we doing them?

Now is the time to start.

It does not have to be complex. elaborate or cover every detail.

All it has to be is a first step.

Talk to your neighbors.

You don't have to make fancy or elaborate plans.

It can be as simple as,

If that happens here, we need to all gather together, leave together, and make sure no one on this block gets left behind.

That is where the lessons of Katrina need to start folks, not in finger pointing, placing blame, but at home.

Now while it is all fresh we need to start and that is why I began this and I end this with a very important question.Do you know your neighbors?

Bus Drivers Go To Work
The image of hundreds maybe thousands of busessitting in flooded areas that could have been used in the New Orleans evacuation continues to prey on my mind.

In my last post, I suggested that all of us need to see that the Local Authorities in our own communities do not do something SO pathetic, if it is US who need to be evacuated.

Still there is a truism about dealing with City Hall and I do not have to repeat it, we all know it.

So let's take this down one more notch closer to us.

School boards. Yes that is who we can contact. Schools use buses on a daily basis, these buses go to the same places everyday. Where they go is derived by the population of the area and everyone knows where the local schools are don't they.

"Because a rapid organization of so many buses would have been impractical,"

I had already compiled the basic ideas for this essay, but reading that made me see red. Confirmed in my mind the basic tunnel vision we face with the bureaucracy.

Let me repeat it.

Because a rapid organization of so many buses would have been impractical,

Now somebody explain to me what is so difficult about have school buses go to the SAME PLACES that they go to EVERY DAY they run?

What is so difficult about telling people in an Emergency, "Go to the nearest School, Buses will be there to evacuate you."

Is there something I am overlooking here? Some facet that I just don't see?

Or are Bureaucrats really as STUPID as I think they are?After thought Some people may be a fair distance from the Evacuation Points. What about them? You run the City Buses on their regular routes. That is how those without cars get around normally, most know where the local schools are, ALL know where the nearest Bus Stop is.

The simplicity is ALL the means are already in place and the Bus Drivers will be doing the same thing that they normally do when working.In my next post I will take evacuation one more notch down to the neighborhood level and Libertarian voluntary associations.

We Cannot Depend on FEMA
Not entirely, there are SOME things we need to tend to ourselves.

Experience from past hurricanes was invaluable in the recent crisis. Earlier traffic jam experience prompted the authorities to make all lanes of trafficconnecting to the affected areas of evacuation outbound, As a result 80% of the 1.4 million population was evacuated without much incident.

This left those without access to vehicles stranded. There have been voices raised in contempt at the Federal Government for not providing buses in a more timely manner. Only 4 days after the catastrophe this has been a cause celbre in from some talking heads.

The obscene part of this is that some of those who rant the loudest left thousands of municipal vehicles City transport buses, School buses and other vehicles SITTING IDLE, until they were flooded by the rising waters.

They were NOT in this condition during the evacuation!

We CANNOT depend on the Federal Government of Fema in these matters, not entirely. The affected area of the storm is some 90,000 square miles this almost equal to the total land area of Louisiana and Mississippi combined. How many cities are in this country? How many counties?

National Guard Units left prepositioned locations as soon as the wind velocities dropped below 50 mph. They had to CUT their way through blocking debris in some instances. Rather than a source of derision, scorn and contempt these young people are real heros, BUT how many counties and cities are in the Area of Disaster?

Do we want a Federal Government with the Power and the Ability to assume total control of such vast areas in almost no time at all?

When WE should be taking care of these matters? When it can actually BEST be done at the Local level?

If the Libertarian point of view means anything it means that WE should take steps to cease control of our own destinies,

This task is best attacked on the local level. How many vehicles can be called upon in an Emergency to evacuate those without access to them? City buses, school buses, church buses, private buses and vans? Where are reasonable assembly points to gather to be evacuated? What is the probable number of the population that will need this service.

I make an individual pledge to try to start, or determine if this has been addressed in my community.

We have a real opportunity here to start instilling Libertarian values and ideas at the local level.

Now some may stand on purity of principles and maintain that the State should not interfere in the individual whether to stay and die or be evacuated.

I do not live in a pure politically theoretical community. I live in one with a lot of women and children who might be rendered helpless in a situation such as in New Orleans now.

Heinlein said that a Society that does not say "Women and Children First" deserves oblivion (paraphrase from memory) Since the means are at hand I am determined that I will help see to it that those resources are not wasted as they were in New Orleans should they be needed in my home community.

The question is what are YOU going to do? Complain about the Federal Government, what FEMA did or did not do or take care of your own where you live?

Now I am not saying we need to disband FEMA and not call on the Federal Government for aid in a Catastrophe that would be ludicrous.

I am saying letting thousands of vehicles stand idle until destroyed by nature, and then wait for someone else in the Federal Government to take care of everything is even more ludicrous.

Waiting for GodotThe play is in two acts.The plot concerns Vladimir (also called Didi) and Estragon (also called Gogo), who arrive at a pre-specified roadside location in order to await the arrival of Godot. Vladimir and Estragon appear to be tramps: their clothes are ragged and do not fit. They pass the time in conversation, and sometimes in conflict. Estragon complains of his ill-fitting boots, and Vladimir struts about stiff-legged due to a painful bladder condition. They make vague allusions to the nature of their circumstances and to the reasons for meeting Godot, but the audience never learns who Godot is or why he is important.

They are soon interrupted by the arrival of Pozzo, a cruel but lyrically gifted man who claims to own the land they stand on, and his servant Lucky, whom he appears to control by means of a lengthy rope. Pozzo sits down to feast on chicken, and afterwords throws the bones to the two tramps. He entertains them by directing Lucky to perform a lively dance, and then deliver an ex tempore lecture on the theories of Bishop Berkeley. After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy arrives with a message he says is from Godot that he will not be coming today, but will come tomorrow. The second act follows a similar pattern to the first, but when Pozzo and Lucky arrive, Pozzo has inexplicably gone blind and Lucky has gone mute. Again the boy arrives and announces that Godot will not appear, also confessing that Godot beats him and makes him sleep in a barn. The much quoted ending of the play might be said to sum up the stasis of the whole work:Vladimir: Well, shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let's go. They do not move.

I recall seeing that play in College when I was MUCH younger, in the first scene taking place in the Spring one Tramp takes off his boots with a sigh of relief and comfort. In the second scene the same Tramp returning spies the boots still sitting there and is delighted that they fit.

What we have witnessed in New Orleans is Waiting for Godot/Fema.

According to an article I read in the Wall Street Journal Marketplace, in many respects the New Orleans Evacuation could be a model for other Major Metropolitan Evacuations. Of 1.4 Million residents over 80% were evacuated without much trouble. Those were the ones with access to vehicles and the lessons of past traffic jams exiting Large Cities were used to good advantage by making all of the lanes outbound.

Those who did NOT have access to vehicles were another story, they sat in collecting points Waiting for Godot/Fema.

What we experienced is a complete breakdown of Local Authority. I do not want a Federal Government with the Power to Arbitrarily assume total control in any area of the United States it wishes to at its own whim. We MUST learn from this experience and spread the Libertarian values of Individual Responsibility and Local Authority, instead of Waiting for Godot.

NEW ORLEANS- More than four days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the National Guard arrived in force Friday with food, water and weapons, churning through the floodwaters in a vast truck convoy that was met with both catcalls and cries of “Thank you, Jesus!” from the suffering multitudes.

But 46-year-old Michael Levy said, “They should have been here days ago. I ain’t glad to see ’em” — words that brought shouts of “Hell, yeah!” from those around him. He added: “We’ve been sleeping on the ... ground like rats. I say burn this whole ... city down.”

National Guard Troops started out from pre-positioned points as soon as the wind velocities dropped below 50 miles per hour in many places they had to cut through debris and downed trees blocking the roads. This is the thanks they get?

"This is a national disgrace," said New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans." Ebbert's job is to coordinate New Orleans' response to emergencies. Somebody should show him this picture and tell him to stop blaming everyone but himself:

I've done it all man, and I'll tell you man, I keep hearing that it's coming. This is coming, that is coming. And my answer to that today is BS, where is the beef? Because there is no beef in this city. "

Nagin said, "Get every Greyhound bus in the country and get them moving."

Some need to ask these two men WHY they let ever City Vehicle. every City Transport Bus, every School Bus sit waiting to be covered by flood waters instead of USING them to move people!

Then they should be horsewhipped.

If they had to, they should have loaded people onto dump trucks to move them out of the reach of the storm.

What can we learn from this debacle? We learned good lessons the last few times about how not to clog the roads during an evacuation. Now if weare lucky we have learned like Charity, Emergency Planning MUST begin at HOME.

Does your City have a Plan in effect to use City Vehicles and Buses to evacuate your City in an emergency? If not then maybe YOU had better do something about it.

I read in the WSJ about a family who went back to their house as SOON as the Storm passed, the woman complained they had no electricity, they had no water and they had no food. They also did not seem to be in too much of a hurry to get to where these things were.

So the question is are we going Take Responsibility for our own future and see to these matters OURSELVES? Or are we going to Wait for Godot

Vladimir: Well, shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let's go. They do not move.

Looting the Big Easy
In any plan, no matter how diligent the crafters, some details will be overlooked. The unforeseen will rear its ugly head and there will invariably be those demand vehemently WHY this is so?

I believe the decline in literacy, might be in part responsible for a lack of understanding of the concept known as "unforeseen".

One detail overlooked was, how DOES a Drug Addict get a fix during a Major Disaster. There appears to have been no contingency plan to address this issue.

New Orleans regrettably appears to be singularly vulnerable to this problem.

New Orleans teems with crime, and the NOPD can?t keep order on a good day. Former commissioner Richard Pennington brought New Orleans? crime rate down from its peak during the mid-1990s. But since Pennington?s departure, crime rates have soared, to ten times the national average. The NOPD might have hundreds of decent officers, but it has a well-deserved institutional image as corrupt, brutal, and incompetent.

Thousands of opportunistic vultures have looted stores all over the city, and shot in the head one police officer who tried to stop them. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has posted photos on its website of other police officers joining in the widespread theft from unattended stores. Looters have picked clean Wal-Mart?s gun department downtown. This anarchy is regrettably not all that surprising. Disaster does not make a weak peacetime civil and social infrastructure strong. Unfortunately, New Orleans must now ask for deserved billions in recovery money even as Americans see images of a city that loots itself on its worst day.

Still despite all the negative stories thanks to lessons learned from the last few major hurricanes, about 80% of the 1.4 Million from New Orleans. We can do better, we must do better, we shall do better.

Too bad the bad eggs get all the publicity and all the hard work and sacrifice of those doing what needs to be done is overlooked.

One of the best articles I have seen was in the WSJ Marketplace Aug 30. But you will have to find an old hard print copy or subscribe to read it online.

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Katrina could be a blueprint for authorities elsewhere. But the relatively smooth departure was little solace to thousands who lacked transportation.

The looting of the Big Easy was not confined with ripping off hospitals and drug stores and the like.

The media looted the attention away from those who were working miracles in an impossible situation, because stories of what is going wrong always sell better than those about what is going right.

I was sickened this evening to hear while I happened to walk by a Television some NBC talking head ranting about it being "Amateur Time" there. You see he had seen Hurricane Recovery operations in Florida he had been there and knew all about it.

Who among us has experienced the complete destruction of a City of over 1 million in the US before? Are there any still alive who lived through the Civil War? Because I do think that was the last time we had a Catastrophe of this magnitude inside our Borders.

If some Recovery Worker who had been pulling dead bodies out of shattered buildings and from the stinking water that covers New Orleans now had laid that full out cold on Prime Time TV? I would have clapped.

There is responsible journalism and there is whipping up crowds into hysteria. They are not the same.

It was bound to happen.On a hunch that we might see phishing scams popping up that take advantage of the terrible destruction that Hurricane Katrina has wrought on the Gulf Coast, I started looking up new Web address registrations for possible scam sites. In just a few minutes, I stumbled upon Katrinahelp.com, which claims to be a donation site for Katrina victims but was almost certainly constructed to steal Paypal usernames and passwords.

The DNS records have very little information on the registrant, which should be the first red flag. The only information in the DNS record is a P.O. box address registered to one "Demon Moon."

What's more, when you click on the "donate" link on the site, you are taken to a Web site designed to look just like Paypal.com. Only problem is that if you visit the site in Firefox, you will see that the Web address in the URL field is still Katrinahelp.com, when it should be Paypal.com.

Maybe this site tries to pull some tricks to manipulate what you see in that window if you visit the page with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but I don't know. I haven't tried it yet. My advice would be to just stay away from this site altogether. I am sure the authorities will have it shuttered soon anyhow.

And then something just like it will popup somewhere else and no doubt someone will fall for it.

Folks stick with Charities you KNOW and it might be best NOT to click on any links you get in emails or elsewhere. Just copy and paste the address.The Red Cross can be trusted, but to be consistent with my former advice here is the URL to copy and paste. ;-)

Expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations... (Passed by the Senate 95-0

In case you missed it let me in the manner of the US Congress ask for Unanimous Consent to Revise and Extend those remarks.Passed by the Senate

95-0

which stated the Senate would not ratify the Protocol unless rapidly developing countries such as China were included in its requirements to reduce greenhouse gases.

The Clinton Administration announced it would not send the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I fail to see George Bush's name anywhere attached to this?Not hard to fathom why, since this was before he became President

Now I encourage my readers to go to the website and view the Senate List themselves, but to start off I would like to List Just a few Senators who

VOTED NOT TO RATIFY KYOTO

A Yeah Vote is to support the Resolution actually its not to hard to deciphere, 5 Senators did not vote at all and EVERY Single Senator who DID vote, voted to support the Resolution and go On Record that they would not Ratify Kyoto as it stood.

Massachusetts: Kennedy (D-MA), Yea Kerry (D-MA), Yea

Illinois: Durbin (D-IL), Yea Moseley-Braun (D-IL), Yea

California: Boxer (D-CA), Yea Feinstein (D-CA), Not Voting

South Dakota: Daschle (D-SD), Yea Johnson (D-SD), Yea

I think I have made my point. I wonder if Bobby Boy discussed his essay on Kyoto and Katrina with his Uncle Teddy?